VMUGIT UC 2013 - 04 Duncan Epping
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This document summarizes a presentation about architecting a virtual infrastructure. The presentation covers design decisions, real world examples, potential pitfalls, and taking an interactive approach. The agenda includes an introduction, overview of design patterns, and a question and answer section. Key aspects of the virtual infrastructure design process are discussed, such as gathering requirements, vision, architecture, transition planning, and change management. Design patterns around sizing, scaling, hosts, networking, storage, and virtual constructs are also covered.
VMUGIT UC 2013 - 04 Duncan Epping
- 1. Architecting a virtual infrastructure Duncan Epping Principal Architect Integration Engineering – R&D
- 2. Agenda Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
- 3. Introduction • Duncan Epping Principal Architect Integration Engineering – R&D • Also known as Customer 0 VCDX 007 Owner of Yellow-Bricks.com Twitter @DuncanYB
- 4. What is this session about? • Architecting a VMware based infrastructure • Design Decisions • Real world examples • Understanding the potential pitfalls • Feel free to tweet / blog about this session • Most importantly – Interact!
- 5. Agenda Method Q/AOverview Design Patterns
- 6. Vision Architecture PlanTransition Manage Governance Requirements Management Change Mgmt Method Articulated vision Business and Technical Goals Requirements, Assumptions, Constraints, Scope, Risks, Use Case Definition Gap Analysis Architecture Definition (Business, Information Systems, Technology) Roadmap definition Implementation planning Iteration planning Implement solution Validation Continuous monitoring Optimization
- 7. Gather input • Most important part of any project • Identify your stakeholders • Gather information and document • Categorize Requirements Nice to have Constraints Assumptions Risks • Conceptualize • Sound like VCDX to Anyone?
- 8. What are we trying to achieve? • Many architectural discussions are about challenges • What are your current challenges? • How do you solve these today? • How would you like to solve these tomorrow? • Ultimately, what are we trying to achieve?
- 9. IT Can Take Weeks to Provision Server deliveryUnpack Build and configure processMigrate to dev test center infrastructure network storage facilities application Security Change control approvals Go live/ production User Acceptance Testing Quality Assurance Ready for use CAB/Deployment planning meetings Line of business selects service Assess capacity Order server Approve purchase order
- 10. That could be… building an SDDC Software-Defined Data Center All infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this data center is entirely automated by software.
- 11. Use cases • Server consolidation (power and cooling savings, green computing, lowering TCO) • OPEX Savings on redundant tasks Self Service Provisioning • Server infrastructure resource optimization (load balancing, high availability) • Standardization • Business Agility (Rapid provisioning) • Infrastructure as a Service
- 12. Business Requirements B101 B102 B103 B104 B105 B106 B107 B108 B109 B110 System provides separate dedicated environments. Complete automation of the provisioning process. System leverages shared infrastructure and resource pooling. Provisioning based on pre-defined policies. Lowering time to market
- 13. Technical Requirements T101 T102 T103 T104 T105 T106 T107 T108 T109 T110 Must integrate with existing ticketing system Leverage thin provisioning for storage efficiency Centralized LDAP directory to be used System supports a catalog of standardized vApp templates. System provides differentiated offerings based on cost. Orchestrated disaster recovery
- 14. Constraints C101 C102 C103 C104 C105 C106 C107 C108 C109 C110 Dell and AMD have been preselected as the platform of choice Eight 1GbE ports will be used per server NetApp’s NAS storage will be used All Tier 2 NAS volumes are de-duplicated Physical switches will not be configured for QoS Existing Cisco TOR environment to be used Limited VLANs available
- 15. Assumptions A101 A102 A103 A104 A105 A106 A107 A108 A109 A110 Staff trained on VMware technology Shared storage configured VLANs and IP address reserved Sufficient rack space available Sufficient power and cooling available
- 16. Agenda Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
- 17. Design Patterns Sizing and Scaling Hosts Networking Storage Virtual Constructs Infrastructure Design Infrastructure Design
- 18. Basic details What is the use case? Time to Market / Business Agility? Business Continuity? What does the environment look like today? How many sites? How many potential virtualization candidates? Multiple waves? How will this impact your Design / Project? Different Cluster / Datacenter structure Within the limits?
- 19. Sizing and scaling Use tools like VMware Capacity Planner PlateSpin Recon Lanamark Do we really need it? Don’t all results just look the same? What is important? What am I designing for? Average vs Peak Consolidation vs Performance
- 20. Compute Considerations How many eggs in on basket? Two sockets vs four sockets Impact of 100:1 consolidation ratio? AMD vs Intel AMD supports more cores, while Intel generally is faster VMmark can be used to make perf comparisons! Sweet spot? Still seems to be dual socket – 96GB of memory Optimal Memory configurations • DIMM sizes versus price • Triple channel configurations • Number of DIMM slots might be different per vendor / model
- 21. Network Sizing Is this ever really a bottleneck? In most of the Capacity Planner reports we’ve seen… Expected average network bandwidth requirement ~ 4Mbps based on an average of 20 VMs per ESXi host. 10GbE will lift all (or most) constraints for a very long time! Use the report to identify anomalies!
- 22. Storage Sizing Not only size but performance matters! (TOTAL IOps × % READ)+ ((TOTAL IOps × % WRITE) × RAID Penalty) (42 x 62%) + (( 42 x 38%) x 2) (26.04) + ((15.96) x 2) 26.04 + 31.92 = 57.96 But what about size? How does this drive your Storage Considerations?
- 23. Storage Considerations RAID level used impacts IOps IOps penalty can be severe Spindle count RTO impacts amount of VMs per Datastore Backup environment need to be capable of restoring within RTO window (RTO * restore speed) / avg VM Size Adding it up… 270 VMs from backup perspective vs 50 VMs from IOps What does your customer feel comfortable with? Going SSD / Hybrid solutions?
- 24. Host Design
- 25. Design Considerations Vendor AMD vs Intel Blade vs Rack Density increases Hot spots Costs Management Additional considerations Is embedded ESXi available? How much local SSD (capacity and IOPS) can it handle? Does it have built-in 2x 10 GE ports? Does the built-in NIC card have hardware iSCSI capability? Management integration
- 26. ESXi boot considerations 4 methods of booting ESXi Local Disk Local SD / USB SAN Boot PXE Boot with Auto-Deploy Considerations USB is cheap Local disk usually higher availability than USB SAN Boot easy to move identity, but what about costs Best of all worlds: Auto-Deploy • Relatively new and dependencies…
- 28. Design Considerations How many VMs? Do I need a dedicated vCenter Server? Can I still use the vCenter Appliance? Use the sizing calculators! Is there a need for the Web Client? Can I use the vCenter Appliance for that? Use it! Will there be other products used like SRM / View / vCloud Director? vCenter Heartbeat requirements?
- 29. Where do we start? How many physical Datacenters will there be? Will each physical DC need a vCenter Server? For each vCenter, do we need multiple virtual Datacenters? For each DC, do we need multiple Clusters? For each Cluster, how many hosts? Physical DC vCenter Datacenter Datacenter Cluster Cluster ESXi ESXi ESXi vCenter Datacenter
- 30. Design Considerations Separate clusters for DMZ? Why not use vShield App or vShield Edge? Separate clusters for test? Might also allow you to test vSphere patches! vCenter Datacenter object is a vMotion boundary not the Cluster! vCenter Datacenter object is a VDS boundary not the Cluster! Will you be using HA / FT / DRS / DPM? Will this impact your design?
- 31. Design Considerations Is 8 the perfect Cluster size? Primary / secondary nodes (4.1 and prior) vs Master / Slave (5.x) Blade environment implication on design? Linked Clones restriction lifter in 5.1! DRS and DPM love big clusters What about EVC? Should I turn it on by default… EVC can only be enabled when all VMs are powered off Did you know that DRS requires EVC to be enabled to balance and place FT virtual machines in a cluster? Is there a need for Resource Pools? How will you handle shares? Reservations / limits?
- 32. Storage
- 33. Design Considerations Protocol Wars! Multiple Tiers? Or even Auto-Tiering, what is the impact? vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) Does it impact sizing? vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness (VASA) Will it impact operations? Thin provisioning? Thin, Thick and Eager Zeroed Thick vSphere vs Storage Array!
- 34. Design Considerations Can we use Storage DRS? Impact on storage array features? Impact on sizing? Impact on other VMware products like vCloud Director? Profile-Driven Storage? How does it utilize VASA? DR Requirements? Or possibly in the future? No more worrying about block sizes with VMFS-5 When upgrading VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 block size does not change! Did you know VAAI is T-10 compliant? Makes leveraging it easier for lower-end devices
- 35. Impact of Features Storage DRS has constraints… SRM does not support Storage vMotion / Storage DRS vCloud Director does support Storage DRS in 5.1! Feature or Product Initial Placement Migration Recommendations Array-based replication (SRDF, MirrorView, SnapMirror, etc ) Supported Manual: I/O and Space Array-based snapshots Supported Manual: I/O and Space Array-based Dedupe Supported Manual: I/O and Space Array based thin provisioning Supported Fully Automated: I/O and Space Array-based auto-tiering (EMC FAST, Compellent Data Progression, etc) Supported Manual: Space Array-based I/O balancing (Dell Equallogic) Supported Manual: Space
- 36. Networking
- 37. Design Considerations What type of vSwitch will be used? VSS vs VDS What are the pSwitch capabilities? Requirements for Jumbo Frames? What type of load balancing will be used? What type of traffic Load Based Teaming vs Virtual Port ID vs IP Hash How about Network Virtualization?
- 38. Design Considerations Network I/O Control Even in 1GbE environment NIOC is useful Especially when connecting outbound Did you know that Limits apply to a NIC pair level? Did you know that shares apply on a NIC Port level? Additional Security Requirements? vShield App vShield App with Data Security vShield Edge 3rd party security products? Hy-trust • 2-factor authentication • Audit trails • Rigid, Hierarchical Access Controls
- 39. Agenda Method Q/AIntro Design Patterns
- 40. And we haven’t even touched on… Automation / Orchestration Monitoring Questions?